Really slow laptop, 100% CPU usage

This is a discussion on Really slow laptop, 100% CPU usage within the Laptop Support forums, part of the Tech Support Forum category. Hello, wondering if someone can help me. My laptop has tanked I think. It's incredibily slow. I checked the processes

Hello, wondering if someone can help me. My laptop has tanked I think. It's incredibily slow. I checked the processes and the CPU usage is at 100% constantly. It takes about 10 minutes to load up, another 3 minutes to open firefox and an eternity to read my outlook emails. Deleting a message alone can take up to a minute. I don't know what to do as it takes so much time to do anything on it.

I've read a post below on this thread from a user who has a slow PC also, I've tried to take some of the steps advised. I started a defrag on the c disk 45 minutes ago and it's still at 3%!!!!??

I'm also running the chkdsk command at the same time and that's still running for over 1/2 hour. It just seems to be at a standstill.

Do you think I should just do a complete reinstall - would it be quicker than all of this?

I ran the command chk dsk from the start-run menu which brought me to a black screen. -- I think that is why the window closed immediately after the command completed. Next time try it again in Recovery Console using an XP install CD. Or you can try a similar approach to yours but enter CMD first on START - RUN.

I'll keep the defrag running to the end then and see if it makes an improvement, thanks.

When I started the defrag this afternoon, I kept getting a message that updates were ready for my computer but I keep clicking on the "update later' option. I then had to go out this evening and left the defrag running, I came back to the first screen where you click on your name (user profile to get into the computer) there are four of us who have our own logins to the laptop but when I clicked my name I got a message to say that my profile couldn't be found (something like that ..) and windows was setting up a temporary profile. When I logged in under this, all my documents are gone? What could have happened to my profile, was it something to do with the updates that were trying to update (no idea what they were) and are my documents still somewhere on my laptop?

I can't even see if defrag is still running or has finished. CPU is still at 100% but now I'm mostly worried that i've lost all my stuff without the chance to copy them over to an external drive which I was going to do if I had to reinstall everything.

Thankyou trigerfinger, I rebooted and thankfully it let me in and all my stuff is back. I didn't want to do anything until I had a reply from someone as I'm not very technical at all. Pheeeew, at least my documents are all there now.

So, back to the original problem of the slowness, I can't really tell if the defrag ran until the end, can I? It's still terribly slow and doesn't seem to have made any difference to the CPU at 100% constantly?

ALso, for the past few months I've been annoyed by all the 'not responding' messages, everything seems to hang and I have to do end program in the task manager very often.

The Laptop is an AMD turion 64, with win xp (made in 2006) I seem to have a lot of stuff on there I don't need and deleted some software off it yesterday but it made no difference. I also have a lot of annoying processes running, stuff from my digital camera that seems to run to check for updates and from my lexmark printer that I don't need. Do I have to go through every process and google them to see if they are good or bad or is there a shorter way of doing this, I only got through 10 out of 70 processes by googling them. Plus I have 4 svchosts running - is this normal?

Auntiej, I've no idea what the updates were, could well have been some windows updates. I think I'm chocker full of everything at the moment!

Thanks, I've gone through that list of checks and completed most of them, currently stuck on removing my Etrust anti virus, I have AVG so I don't think I need the etrust?

Problem is that it wont delete, keeps hanging on the eggtimer in the add remove program screen.

This is taking ages to get through, I'll see how I go but I'm feeling like I want to delete everything and start again, its so time consuming with my laptop being so incredibly slow. When I close down a window, it doesn't even close down, it leaves a bit of the screen on top of another, this morning I had bits of three different windows all on top of one another and I didn't even know which one was active. Sole destroying....

Thanks anyways, I'll keep going for now.

EDIT: I've rebooted four times as removing the Etrust hangs the laptop, any ideas how to remove this another way?

That program doesn't work for me triggerfinger, I get the black command screen, stuff flashes up but it disappears before i can read it. In add/remove programs it says the etrust is rarely used so perhaps its not in conflict with AVG afterall?

After doing the above steps as advised - I'm still slow, made no difference to the CPU @ 100%.

RAM is simple to upgrade. On a laptop there are sevaral panels on the bottom side. Those panels open up to the hard-drive, memory, battery, and usually somethign else. Any how what is the exact model of your laptop?

On an XP machine 2GB will be efficient enough. On a Vista, more is recommended.

That program doesn't work for me triggerfinger, I get the black command screen, stuff flashes up but it disappears before i can read it. In add/remove programs it says the etrust is rarely used so perhaps its not in conflict with AVG afterall?

After doing the above steps as advised - I'm still slow, made no difference to the CPU @ 100%.

Have you tried uninstalling from ADD/REMOVE in Safe Mode? If that doesn't work you can always do the dirty way of deleting the eTrust folder in Program Files directory.

Open task manager and do a screen shot of the applications that eat up a lot of CPU. Upload the screen shot here so we can see and may be have an idea what to do next.